White and Other Tales of Ruin

Peter strolled back to them, concern creasing his brow. “What was that she said?” he asked.

“Does it matter? She’s ill.” Lucy-Anne was angry, Doug could tell that the moment she spoke, but she did not wish to reveal it to her old uncle.

Peter, however, was wise behind that crazy beard. “Sorry Lucy-Anne. Thoughtless of me. It’s just … well, you’ve a very bright girl there.”

“Research into nanotechnology began in the early ‘80s,” Gemma mumbled. “And there were lots of scientists convinced — ”

“Gemma,” Doug said, confused and afraid and upset. It was not his daughter saying these things, not the Gemma he knew, the little girl who loved the Teletubbies and Winnie the Pooh and riding her tricycle and helping him dig the garden, so long as he moved all the worms out of the way because they were icky.

This was not her.

“Wait, leave her, listen,” Peter said.

“ — that it would be the new engineering. The Japanese created the first robots small enough to travel through veins, shredding fatty deposits or cancerous cells. The AT amp; T Bell laboratories in New Jersey constructed gears smaller in diameter than a human hair, and an electric motor a tenth of a millimetre across was built … and then it went top secret, and the various bodies involved started turning the positive research to more warlike ends.” There was a pause, just long enough to mark a change of tone. “As always, Man is distinguished only by his foolishness, and nothing good can come of him.”

“Gemma, please honey …” Lucy-Anne said, and there was such a note of helplessness in her voice that it froze them all, for just a second or two.

Then Gemma whined, cried for a few seconds more and fell asleep.

They could not wake her.

Doug and Lucy-Anne refused to leave her side, so Peter hurried away and soaked his shirt in a nearby stream. He squeezed it over Gemma’s face as Doug held her in his arms. The water splashed on her skin, ran across her closed eyelids — they were twitching as her eyes rolled behind them — and they even forced some of it between her lips.

But Gemma would not wake up.

“We have to go back,” Lucy-Anne said. “Get her to bed, make her warm.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and Doug could see the truth of their situation in her eyes even as her mouth tried to deny it.

“You know there’s no point, honey,” he said carefully. “By the time we get back to the house it’ll be lunchtime, and I doubt we’ll set out again before … the end of the day. And …” He looked up at Peter where he stood a little distance away, giving the family the space he assumed they needed. “Well, Gemma will be as comfortable up in the hills as she will in some bed hidden away indoors.”

Lucy-Anne’s mouth pursed tightly as she held back tears. “I wanted her to be awake when we died,” she said quietly. “Is that selfish of me?”

Doug felt his face burning and his nose tingling as tears came. He had been thinking the same thing. “We’ll be together,” he said, “whether she’s awake or asleep.”

“What was she saying?” Peter asked quietly. “About the nanos? She was talking about the nanos, wasn’t she? Have there been programmes on television, documentaries, news items? Never watch it myself, but it seems to me that was all pretty technical for a pretty little girl like Gemma.”

“It wasn’t her talking,” Doug said, and he hugged her tight to his chest. She was warm and twitching slightly in his arms. Her eyelids flexed as her eyes rolled. He looked up at Peter. “Can we go now?”

Peter frowned and wanted to say more, Doug could see that. But the old man nodded and smiled, and waved them onward. “You carry her for now,” he said to Doug. “I’ll take her from you when you get tired.”

“And then I’ll have her,” Lucy-Anne said. She stayed close to Doug, reaching out every few steps to stroke her daughter’s hair or touch her husband’s face.

The going was more difficult, the hillside becoming steeper as they emerged from the forest, but the views did much to alleviate the pain Doug was already feeling in his back and legs. His daughter may only be small, but asleep like this she was a dead weight. Dead people are heavier, he seemed to remember reading somewhere, and the thought chilled him. But then he almost smiled. When they died, they would weigh nothing at all.

“Lovely view of the house and gardens from about here,” Peter said, letting them pause and look back down the way they had come.

Doug lowered his daughter to the ground. She groaned slightly, mumbled something, but he didn’t try too hard to hear what it was. He was afraid it would be something he did not wish to know.